Travel, Part 1 (Patreon)

The last couple of weeks have been pretty busy for me! So I thought I'd share a little, at least the Magic-related stuff.

As you may have guessed from this comic, earlier this month I was in Japan. Long story short, my son has been in Japan on an exchange program, so we decided to meet up with him at the end of his trip. Most of this trip was spent doing family-related stuff, but I couldn't avoid Magic--just check out the famous Shibuya Scramble Crossing:

Nevertheless, I had to at least check out the Hareruya card shops. They have a number of stores, but I visited the Tournament Center in Tokyo. Of course, everything is so packed in Tokyo that I almost missed the sign, but I eventually found it and made my way up to the second story of the building it was in.

The first thing you see when coming to the store is a sign describing the purchase limits for Final Fantasy packs. Not that I actually saw any packs for sale!

Inside I was greeted by a couple of rows of display cases full of Magic cards. It was really impressive to see! The cards were sorted by color, spell type, and then casting cost.

I could have spent hours looking at all these cards, which ranged from Standard and Commander staples to Power 9. Even though there was all this variety, most people seemed to be buying either Final Fantasy cards or repacks. There were multiple cases highlighting the cards you could get in the repacks, and they came in multiple tiers, from around $5 to up to $100 (if I remember correctly). You can see one of these cases on the left here:

Duals and other revised list staples were well-represented in the repacks. Overall the prices were really good. Many Commander staples didn't seem to be in as high of demand as in the US. Also, there were many, many shelves with boxes of sleeved, pre-priced cards. So if you had the time to search through these boxes, you could find a lot of cards that had maybe spiked since they were priced. I didn't have time to do all this, so my final haul was pretty modest:

I found this beautiful Ultimate Guard Sidewinder (which I now use for my Rasputin deck). I also had to get a deck box and sleeves with the famous Hareruya logo that I remember so many players using in past Pro Tours. Finally I picked up a few old-frame cards that would be expensive in English, but were pretty cheap in Japanese, to put into some of my Commander decks.

That was about it for my Magic-related activities in Japan. Besides Hareruya, I visited many shrines, went to a baseball game, experienced a teamLab Planets museum, went to the Pokémon Cafe, and ate so much amazing food (not at the Pokémon Cafe). When I next get a chance, I'll tell you a little about my MagicCon experience.